WG211/M24Steimann

A really old new metatheory of software languages

While Chomsky's language stack dominates the theory of software languages to this day, in linguistics, it was actually quite short-lived, predated and superseeded by theories that put words (terminals), rather than phrases (nonterminals), at the center of all grammatical structure. I will show how all software languages can be grown from almost nothing, by using a simple grammatical framework known as dependency grammar.

My talk is based on my paper.